When decorating a space, it is often desirable to include trees as part of such decorations. To allow such decorations to last substantially indefinitely without maintenance and allow for repeated cycles of storage and deployment of such decorations, it is desirable to provide artificial trees rather than live trees. An example of such decorations are Christmas trees typically deployed during holiday seasons occurring near the end of each calendar year.
Such artificial trees are often configured to be collapsible so that they take up a minimum of space during initial shipping and inventory before being sold, and also to allow the user to store the tree when not in use in a relatively small space and protected from damage. Some such collapsible Christmas trees or other trees have limbs which are removably attached from a central trunk. The limbs typically include further branches which extend from the limbs which can be formed of wire or other materials with the limbs formed of wood, steel or other relatively rigid materials and the central trunk formed of wood, metal or other materials that are substantially rigid and strong enough to handle the loads encountered by carrying the limbs. Typically, needles of an artificial nature are fastened by wire, adhesive or otherwise to the branches extending from the limbs and/or directly to the limbs themselves.
In some cases lighting is permanently fixed to the limbs, such as with lights coupled to cords and with the cords plugging into a central cord running up the trunk. With other collapsible Christmas trees the limbs are not removed from the trunk but rather pivot from a stored orientation to a deployed orientation. With such trees the deployed orientation is generally perpendicular to the trunk and the stored orientation is somewhere between 45° pivoted away from horizontal to a substantially vertical orientation parallel to the trunk.
While such pivotable limbs on Christmas trees have the benefit of avoiding the requirement that the limbs be attached to the central trunk, difficulty is encountered in transitioning the limbs from a collapsed orientation to a deployed orientation. The limb reorienting process is thus highly labor intensive as each limb is adjustably positioned.